Thoughts on Perl and Emacs, technology and writing

First steps with Plack/Twiggy on Windows

Now I have my command prompt set up the way I like it, installing modules into strawberry perl from from cpan is easy. Okay, fine, it was easy before, but now I just need to run my batch file and type cpan.

Okay, so one of the things I’m interested in is running Plack on Windows. And Twiggy looks like the obvious choice for HTTP servers supporting PSGI – the benchmarks I looked at state it is the second most performant pure(ish)-perl option after Starman and Starman clearly states it isn’t supported on Windows. Does the fact that Twiggy doesn’t say that mean that it works?

c:\home\jared>cpan
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.9452)
Enter 'h' for help.
cpan> install Plack::Handler::Twiggy
...
t/02_signals.t .......... skipped: Broken perl detected,
skipping tests.
t/03_child.t ............ skipped: Your perl interpreter
is badly BROKEN. Child watchers will not work, ever. Try
upgrading to a newer perl or a working perl (cygwin's perl
is known to work). If that is not an option, you should be
able to use the remaining functionality of AnyEvent, but
child watchers WILL NOT WORK.
...

Yikes! This was emitted when building AnyEvent (a pretty key part of Twiggy). It doesn’t sound good does it? It comes from the following test:

BEGIN {
# check for broken perls
if ($^O =~ /mswin32/i) {
my$ok;
local$SIG{CHLD} = sub { $ok = 1 };
kill'CHLD', 0;
unless ($ok) {
print <<EOF;
1..0 # SKIP Your perl interpreter is badly BROKEN. Child watchers will not work, ever. Try upgrading to a newer perl or a working perl (cygwin's perl is known to work). If that is not an option, you should be able to use the remaining functionality of AnyEvent, but child watchers WILL NOT WORK.
EOFexit 0;
}
}
}

Okay, so child watchers don’t work (whatever they are). Hopefully Twiggy doesn’t need ’em. Let’s plough on regardless. This is the standard Hello World app.